12 minute read
CROSSROADS by Jonathan Franzen
crossroads
A CALLING FOR CHARLIE BARNES
Ferris, Joshua Little, Brown (352 pp.) $22.49 | Sep. 28, 2021 978-0-31633-353-5
The near death of a would-be salesman, as told by his fabulist son. “If my father was something of a joke, he was also a fucking colossus,” maintains our narrator, Jake Barnes, son of Charlie Barnes, a man once known as Steady Boy. By the time Ferris’ fourth novel opens in the fall of 2008, on the day Charlie receives a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, the man has seen a lot of great business ideas go down in flames. The flying toupee, the herbicide, the clown franchise, the art school—not even the investment firm for retirees has panned out for this one-time employee of Bear Stearns. Though his son Jake, a successful novelist who pals around with the McEwans in the Cotswolds, claims he “promised the old man to tell it straight this time, to stick to the facts for once,” the reader may have their doubts. And why? Well, among the mothers of Charlie’s several children are wives named Sue Starter, Barbara LeFurst, Charley Proffit, Barbara Ledeux, and Evangeline—though Barbara Ledeux claims the first Barbara was invented only to torture her, and as the layers of myth and embellishment are peeled away in successive sections labeled Farce, Fiction, and The Facts, we have less and less reason to doubt her. And what about this Jake Barnes? After a while we notice he’s told us very little about himself. “You’ve known you were a writer since you read Hemingway,” says his dad. “It was Dostoyevsky…and I was twelve,” replies the possibly misnamed Jake Barnes. Ferris’ own award-winning debut, Then We Came to the End (2007), gets name-checked in the novel’s final section: “Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid book.” But that’s Jake talking, not Joshua, and DeLillo said it first in Americana, and anyway, he’s just kidding.
Good old-fashioned faux metafiction about death and family, full of panic and glee.
CROSSROADS
Franzen, Jonathan Farrar, Straus and Giroux (592 pp.) $30.00 | Oct. 5, 2021 978-0-374-18117-8
This first novel in an ambitious trilogy tracks a suburban Chicago family in a time of personal and societal turmoil. It says a lot that, at almost 600 pages, Franzen’s latest novel, set amid the waning years of the Vietnam War, leaves you wanting more. That it does so is also very good news: It’s the first in what promises to be a sprawling trilogy, continuing to the present day, which the author has titled A Key to All Mythologies in what is presumably a wink at its far-from-modest ambitions—yes, à la Middlemarch. That reference is classic Franzen, who imbues his books with big ideas, in this case about responsibility to family, self, God, country, and one’s fellow man, among other matters, all the while digging deep into his characters’ emotions, experiences, desires, and doubts in a way that will please readers seeking to connect to books heart-first. Here, the story follows two generations of the Hildebrandt family, headed by Russ, the associate pastor of a church in the fictional town of New Prospect, Illinois, who, when we first meet him in the leadup to Christmas 1971, is nursing a crush on a recently widowed parishioner and a grudge against the groovily charismatic leader of the church’s popular youth group, Crossroads, in which three of Russ’ four children are variously involved. Russ’ wife, Marion, who has gained weight over the years and lost her pre-maternal intensity and with it her husband’s sexual interest, is nursing a few secret preoccupations of her own, as are the couple’s three oldest children, Clem, Becky, and Perry. Each of the five characters, among whose perspectives Franzen adroitly toggles, is struggling with matters of morality and integrity, privilege and
purpose, driven in part by the dueling desires for independence and connection. Their internal battles—to fight in an unjust war or unjustly let others fight in your stead, to fight their way out of a marriage or fight to stay in it, to fight for sanity or surrender to madness, to fight to define themselves and determine their paths or to cede that control to others, to name a few—are set against the backdrop of an era in which “love” is everywhere but empathy is in short supply, where hugs are liberally dispensed but real connection’s harder to come by.
Franzen’s intensely absorbing novel is amusing, excruciating, and at times unexpectedly uplifting—in a word, exquisite.
WHAT ISN’T REMEMBERED Stories
Gorcheva-Newberry, Kristina Univ. of Nebraska (276 pp.) $19.95 paper | Sep. 1, 2021 978-1-4962-2913-7
A collection of short, melancholy stories focusing on Russian immigrants to the United States. The short stories in this debut collection chronicle the lives of characters beset by persistent regrets and dissatisfactions. Most of the central figures are Russian, and many have immigrated or are considering immigrating to the United States. Gorcheva-Newberry, herself a Russian émigré, displays a keen understanding of her home country’s cultural particularities in some of her collection’s finest stories: In “Heroes of Our Time,” a teenage boy ventures into Moscow in the spring of 1991 to attempt to recruit a sex worker on behalf of his ailing grandfather only to accidentally find himself entangled with a militant pro-aristocracy group. In “Boys on the Moskva River,” the narrator remembers the life and violent death of his brother, Konstantin, whom their mother preferred and who was involved with organized crime. Gorcheva-Newberry’s prose is clear and can quickly cut to the marrow of a complex emotional experience: In “The Suicide Note,” a Russian immigrant reflects, “I thought how hard it was to make someone laugh in a foreign language. And if you couldn’t laugh together, how could you live together? In that sense America remained a mystery to me.” For all its strengths, however, this collection is a frustrating experience. GorchevaNewberry’s skills as a prose stylist do not extend to dialogue, and many of her characters state their feelings in an unrealistically straightforward way. The collection’s weakest stories lack the cultural and psychological specificity of its strongest and detract from the reading experience. “Simple Song #9,” for instance, follows the romance and breakup of archetypal characters named “Boy” and “Girl,” featuring dreary sentences like, “Girl meets Man.” Gorcheva-Newberry is on firmer and more rewarding territory in her more conventional stories.
A mixed effort with some real high points.
THE GUIDE
Heller, Peter Knopf (272 pp.) $26.99 | Aug. 24, 2021 978-0-525-65776-7
A fishing adventure turns dark as night. Fisherman’s noir isn’t a genre, but maybe it should be. The high-end Colorado resort at the heart of this soulful mystery offers some of the best angling in the country, with waters seemingly carved out of Eden. It’s a nice getaway from the persistent strains of Covid-19. But something’s not right. The neighbor upstream likes to shoot at visitors who get too close to his property. Guests disappear for stretches at a time and return acting as if they’re survived a horrible trauma. And the manager seems to have a fast-and-loose relationship with the truth. The new guide, a grief-stricken 25-year-old named Jack, happens to be a keen observer with an
the morning star
eye for the out of the ordinary. He also happens to be falling in love with Alison K., the famous but effortlessly earthy singer he’s been assigned to guide through a week of good fishing. This is an unconventional mystery, an unconventional romance, and an unconventional adventure, creepy and spiritual in equal measure. Jack has a thing for eighth-century Chinese poetry. He describes one of his favorite poets as “an aficionado of loss and also of nature, which Jack could relate to.” Jack has lost both his mother and his best friend, and he blames himself for both deaths. He escapes through reading and fishing. But this is no escape, unless you’re the reader. The author clearly knows his way around a river; the long, descriptive passages create a vivid sense of place and action even if they may puzzle those of us who don’t know a mayfly from a riffle. By the time Jack and Alison encounter a young woman running down the road in a hospital gown in a scene right out of the sinister noir Kiss Me Deadly, they’re in too deep, and they’re too curious, to quit the dangerous puzzle before them. You might feel the same.
There’s danger at the end of the line in this unconventional mystery.
ISLAND
Jacobsen, Siri Ranva Hjelm Trans. by Waight, Caroline Pushkin Press (160 pp.) $16.95 paper | Sep. 7, 2021 978-1-782-27580-0
A young woman searches for home on a remote island. Making her literary debut, Jacobsen, a third-generation Faroese-Dane, fashions a spare, lyrical novel, translated by Waight, tracing the fortunes and migrations of a Faroese family: some who spent their lives on the islands, others—like the narrator’s grandparents—who immigrated to Denmark. “Who were we?” asks the narrator. “The Faroese, those who stayed, and us, the blood guests, biological seeds sown by migrants?” On visits to the islands with her parents, the narrator teases out the family’s tangled history and her own ancestry. “In old photographs,” she observes, “eyes are always bright. Hands are meticulously placed,” but real life is messy: marred by failed dreams, mysterious disappearances, and secret longings. Jacobsen’s finely wrought cast of characters includes the narrator’s grandfather Fritz, whose dream of becoming an electrical engineer was thwarted for lack of money; her grandmother Marita, a spirited woman who followed Fritz to Denmark bearing a secret; her imperious—and wealthy—great-aunt Ingrún; and her grandfather’s brother, Ragnar, the island’s sole communist. War swirls in the background as Germans occupy Denmark and the British and then Danes occupy the Faroes. Even during the Cold War, the islands’ strategic location made it a site of intrigue: Informants swarmed, including the CIA. Home, exile, and belonging are overarching themes as the narrator considers the effects of migration over three generations: “Assimilation,” she reflects, “is a methodical loss of memory.” The first generation of immigrants, she realizes, feels inexorably compelled to seek a larger world; the next generation “maybe straddles the gap, until something cracks, and becomes doubly bad, nonlingual, doubly alone. Or it grinds twice as hard, expands the business, buys the carport, gets the medical degree.” The third generation, though, to which the narrator and Jacobsen belong, “carries the crossing within it like a loss.”
A sensitive meditation on belonging.
THE MORNING STAR
Knausgaard, Karl Ove Trans. by Aitken, Martin Penguin Press (688 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 28, 2021 978-0-399-56342-3
A new heavenly body sends the lives of a handful of Norwegians off-kilter.
Nobody’s sure what to make of the emergence of a new bright light in the sky. A star? A sign of a miracle? A distant
supernova? Regardless, Knausgaard’s cast of characters soon faces domestic disruptions to match the astral one. A man despairs of helping his wife, so racked with madness she’s seemingly torn the head off a cat. A pastor presides over the funeral of a reclusive man who bears an uncanny resemblance to one she’s recently met. Members of a death-metal band are found massacred; a boorish, arrogant journalist tries to cover the story while his wife, a caretaker in a prison, tries to locate an escapee. A nurse starts helping with an autopsy only to discover the corpse isn’t dead. Knausgaard circulates through these characters and a handful more, not to connect them plotwise so much as to achieve a symphonic effect: Everybody is experiencing a sense of both fear and wonder, though some are better at dealing with those emotions than others. Each character is rendered with a detail-rich but cool, plainspoken register that’s Knausgaard’s trademark. And, much as he did in the final volume of his autofiction epic, My Struggle, he concludes with a philosophical longueur, here a contemplation about how myth, religion, and folklore address a porous boundary between life and death. (The abundance of religious references throughout the book, from Bible quotes to tree of knowledge references, sets the table for that somewhat.) For Knausgaard fans, this mix of pointillistic domestic drama and New Age woo-woo will feel familiar, though the lack of a strong narrative arc feels more ungainly in an explicitly fictional setting.
A sui generis metaphysical yarn, engrossing in its particulars if broadly rambling.
LITANI
Lourey, Jess Thomas & Mercer (293 pp.) $15.95 paper | Oct. 19, 2021 978-1-5420-2701-4
Lourey serves up another terrifying reality-based thriller. When Frankie Jubilee’s parents divorced, she stayed in California with her botanist father while her mother, Linda, returned to their hometown in Minnesota, where Frankie made only one brief, disastrous visit before her father died. At 14 she returns to Litani to live with Linda, a prosecutor, and is dropped into the poisonous atmosphere created by the town children, who play something they call The Game. Her mother, deeply involved with crime and criminals, pushes her out the door to go make some friends, telling her not to leave the nearby playground (what 14-year-olds go to the playground?!) or talk to any adults. Frankie’s attracted to the woods, though, where she spent many happy hours with her father and became a plant expert herself, until she’s set upon by three tough little girls who beat her up and take her shoes while taunting her about The Game. They’re about to steal her most precious possession, a book of her drawings of plants with faces, when she’s rescued by Crane, an older teen who becomes her friend. Frankie slowly discovers that her mother is working to take down a ring of pedophiles preying on local children, an organization at least partially based in the trailer park where Crane lives. At the same time, Frankie begins to learn about her parents’ pasts, especially that of her father, who forever blamed himself for the drowning of his younger brother. With only a stray kitten to comfort her, she does her best to investigate past and present crimes while trying to escape becoming a victim of The Game.
Several real-life cases provide the impetus for a tale of horror, grit, and, ultimately, hope.
